stunned and nearly speechless to learn my book has been nominated for the Krause Essay Prize! (current company: Amy Fusselman, Hannah Gadsby, Sadia Hassan, what is this life)

scheming schemes, making plans. it’s going to be a big year.

one of us had to get blood drawn today. this photo commemorates what we’ve been affectionately referring to as “blood day” (we did great) 💉

no longer recall what context these notes were taken in, but they seem about right

look at this beauty! congratulations @katecolby131!

i mean can you even believe it

I got honored!

such a sucker for good sky action

road trip, lovely light

(the sequel: a love story)

please enjoy my photo essay: “First Day of Class” 😖

current status at t-7 days (yes I’m reading everything simultaneously)

axolotl glam shots

next up! been looking forward to this for a while.

student readings + celebrating on the last day of class

gearing up @thesetwohands come visit #treatordeal2018

so glad to be part of this year’s Brew & Forge Bookfair! buy books! support trans Latinx organizing! what could be better? www.brewandforge.com

isn’t there a term in cycling that means you benefit from proximity other cyclists? i feel like that. thank you @entropymagazine for including me in this amazing list with so many authors i admire. 🥰 (& your cover looks pretty great in this company @travisharpie!)

many sources of light

welcome to yr 40s @stephencrocker ! already off to a great start! 🎂⛸🏆❤️

My dreams have been vivid, but I don’t remember them. Only wake with the feeling of having been engaged in some high drama. The impressions I’m left with are washes of color – red to magenta. Intense, pulsing blue.

This year, even in February’s depths, I anticipate spring. Last night, an orange band low across the horizon cheered me. A bright sheen across every layer of ice.

--

It’s a busy time. I’m meeting with students. They tell me their plans, their anxieties. If there was a time I envied their youth, I no longer do. Frenetic desires no longer hold appeal. I am no longer interested in the sharp edges of wholly untested ambition.

My ambitions now: the work is the work. It is not as though I am untouched by desire. The surprise and seductiveness of recognition. I am not above it. The pleasures of it are uneasy, though. Complicated. I am not yet sure what I am trying to say.

--

Kate says that she wrote most of I Mean while driving. She was teaching at URI then, spending hours on the road. She kept a notepad near her. I keep a notepad in my car, too. Scribble things to myself, but never much of value, and frequently illegible.

Here is a note I wrote to myself recently while driving:

was no god who at the conference table said “good girl” fed me scraps of the banquet I had myself prepared

It was a reference to an incident years ago. A work dinner I was hosting for out-of-town investors of one sort or another. After we ate, I rose to bring the platter of desserts to the table. A tray of small things – petit fours, macarons. The man seated at the head of the table, as I placed it down in front of him said, “Ah yes. Good girl.”

I was so shaken and enraged, I had to excuse myself. I don’t remember what happened next. Did they leave? Did we speak again? Surely someone stepped in to account for my absence. Why, after all this time, am I remembering it now?

--

As for the work: A nearly complete first draft of a new collection. The outline for the next project proposal: something sprawling and risky that I can’t yet get my head around, but grant deadlines require clarity, even if somewhat artificial. And the ever-present shape-shifting novel. (For a photograph last week, I trudged through the wet snow back to Nine Men’s Misery. How will this all come together? How am I ever going to make this work? “The work is the work” in all its triteness running in a constant, oddly reassuring loop.)

Each morning, as I open my laptop, I’m confronted by the fleeting shame of the prior night’s guilty pleasures – the final frame of the Game of Thrones episode we had watched in bed hours before. Rising early in the dark, coming to my desk while the world around me is quiet feels virtuous. Remembering that I fell asleep watching men argue over who would be “warden of the north,” with the clanging of their swords following me into my dreams: well the sheen of virtue does tarnish a bit.

—

I am reading Kate Colby’s Dream of the Trenches, and am reminded of how sustaining it is to have friends whose work you admire. The book is composed of two parts: one long lyric essay, and then a series of tiny (150-word) ones. Kate’s concerns are mid-life, motherhood, writing, reading, knowing and unknowing, the way a life seems at times to collapse in on itself. She observes and interrogates language with such relentless precision.

From “Driving to Margaret’s Mother’s Memorial Service:”

The smell of rain on hot pavement connects this moment to so many others, none of which I can remember.

Is every moment more a sequel of or serial with the one before?

A conundrum’s a semantic impasse, not an actual condition of the world.

And later:

When you start habitually narrating yourself it begins to feel as though a thing hasn’t happened if you can’t adequately describe it. But description and narration are bound by a temporal standard that communication necessitates. So you become dependent on description for experience, and then the description compromises the experience with its falsifying strictures. Sometimes I wonder if I actually preempt some of my experiences by narrating them or as even before they happen, replacing them with their own anticipatory representations.

—

None of my closest friends watch Game of Thrones for reasons I cannot argue against: “Too sexist, too violent, too many dragons.” “I just can’t bear all the blood sounds.” I can’t say why, entirely, that I enjoy something that I would normally not expect I would. There is spectacle. I find the actors quite riveting. There is something too about character development that M and I will often talk about over breakfast, which makes it all feel a little bit like “research.” But perhaps there’s no need to try to defend it or suggest it is more than it is. A shared, fully-rendered fantasy we can escape to, where we can experience the relief and satisfaction of recognizable desires and ambitions resolved without personal consequence.

Loving Game of Thrones is also one of my very few experiences of being a “fan” of something. I don’t follow sports of any kind, can’t tell you much about popular music, don’t know what’s really going on most of the time when my twitter stream goes full-on Oscars. But Game of Thrones! I can mention it at a party or extended family gathering and people actually know what I’m talking about. There is pleasure in that too.

—

Leaving this off where I must for now, I feel as though I should offer some sort of meditation linking the character of Cersei Lannister in her own mid-life to Kate’s ontological inquiries. That essay will have to wait.

Last summer, I read Wayne Koestenbaum’s Notes on Glaze, mostly in short bursts, poolside, while my son splashed and wrinkled in the over-chlorinated water.

Beyond the photographs and their accompanying short essays, what has remained with me is the inquiry. Koestenbaum was sent photographs, without any identifying or contextual information, and asked to write extended captions on them for on ongoing column at Cabinet Magazine. In the introduction to the book that was later composed of these text and image pairings, he says:

The column began with cheekiness, but quickly accommodated itself to more serious violations, even if I treated trauma whimsically. Language, when worked, is a wounding business, and these columns gave me a chance to measure the wound of being wrongly seen, the wound of assembling a self, and the wound of any form of duress, whether mild or mortifying.

Later that year, I heard Teju Cole discuss his desire, in Blind Spot, his photograph and text collection, to bring objects together in visual space – objects that have “an organic but unacknowledged relationship to each other.”

What struck me in these comments about both projects was the importance of the space between – the as yet inarticulate silence between the photographs Koestenbaum was given and the text that might be brought into space with them, the about-to-be-identified linkages between Cole’s objects. The attempt to make meaning from and in those gaps.

--

Upon request, I was generously given a list of the hundreds of items labeled “Korean” in the RISD Museum’s East Asian Art collection. (As an aside, the document was charmingly titled “Korean for Mary-Kim.”) Most of the objects, the earliest of which is identified as “3rd century CE,” are credited: “Artist unknown, Korean.” This anonymity persists until, of course, the 20th century. Scrolling through the 86-page document, photograph after photograph, object after object, the phrase “Artist unknown, Korean,” asserts itself becomes a kind of poetic refrain, anaphora:

In an exhibition catalog from the Seattle Art Museum in 1992, I first encountered this preamble in the relatively brief discussion of Korean lacquer art:

In Korea, all arts have suffered badly from centuries of invasion and warfare. Perishable arts, including lacquer, are almost nonexistent for many periods. Most extant lacquers have been excavated from tombs or other archaeological sites and have been damaged during burial. In addition, most pieces from the period between the eleventh century and the Japanese invasions of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the late sixteenth century are in Japan, removed from their cultural context….

How to address incomplete or unknowable provenance? One approach is perhaps through imaginative response. A series of texts around missing objects, gaps, the ruptures in the collection. An attempt to explain those absences, to raise questions around the “centuries of invasion” referred to above.

In a recent interview, Regine Basha of Pioneer Works observed that “decentralizing the art object and emphasizing the process over the product is one way to stimulate more critical engagement and debate,” and I am thinking about how this might be applicable, through multiple points of view, or interweaving multiple, even conflicting interpretations or sources.

I’ve always thought of myself as a poet and my ambition in fiction was to write fiction that was organized the way poetry is. Not to write poetic prose or a novel with a poetic texture, but work where fiction doesn’t originate in the illusion that we’re reproducing some other reality.

And later, on “syntax:”

… extending the meaning of the word beyond the relationship between words in a sentence to the relationship between sentences in a paragraph or between paragraphs in a chapter. I claim syntax is where the meaning of a written work essentially lies. In other words, you can write about one thing and mean something else.

[…]Whatever element of non-literary reality the poem began with has been put through a series of distillations to produce an elixir that is in itself delicious and evocative and can suggest many more things than what gave the poem its start….Such poetry aspires to the abstraction that music has.

Mathews quotes from an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson called “A Humble Remonstrance:”

The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.

I’m working my way — slowly, luxuriously — through the interviews in the Wave Books collection, What Is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know). Each morning, I read a single interview. This morning, Harryette Mullen interviewed (by postcard!) by Barbara Henning in 1996.

Writing the poem [from Trimmings] also involved a process of making lists. First, I made a list of words referring to anything worn by women. Each word on that list became the topic of a prose poem. (I started with clothing, then decided to include accessories. There were a few things I decided not to write about, such as wigs, dentures, and so forth.) Then I made more lists by free associating with words from the first list. I generated lists of words that might be synonyms (pants/jeans/slacks/britches), homonyms (duds/duds, skirt/skirt), puns or homophones (furbelow, suede/swayed), or that had some metaphorical metonymical, or rhyming connection (blouse/dart/sleeve/heart, pearl/mother, flapper/shimmy/chemise), or words that were on the same page of the dictionary (chemise/chemist). I would improvise a possible sequence of words, seeing what the list might suggest in the way of a minimal narrative, a metaphor, an association, or pun.

“Far from being elitist,” she says, “they make the creative process more accessible as they deflate the divine afflatus of artistic inspiration. A formal constraint, such as a lipogram, gives the writer a definite problem to tackle.” Later, she adds, “it simply gives the writer a more eclectic array of aesthetic tools.”

Denning asks a question about fragments: “I find that I work with fragments in part because I’m so busy. Does the urban bustle affect your turning to fragments?” Perhaps there was a slightly different inflection or relevance to the question in 1996, when the interview transpired, before the ubiquity of fragments, but either way, Mullen’s response seems timely, insightful, and surprisingly moving:

Writing in fragments seems to be a very contemporary response to postmodern distraction, the channel-surfing attention span, our fractured sense of time, on the one hand…. On the other hand, when I think of poetry in fragments, I think of Sappho, whose work comes to us, like classic Greek art and architecture, as enigmatic shards and evocative ruins. Given the human capacity to destroy civilization “with the touch of a button” the same way we microwave lean cuisine, ancient ruins stand as figures for the obliteration of ourselves and our own culture.

So many insights in this brief excerpt of this interview, which I suspect I will return to repeatedly, but perhaps my favorite comment is about something I have been thinking for many years, attempting to articulate. Here, Mullen gets to the heart of it:

I think of myself and my writing as being marginal to all of the different communities that have contributed to the poetic idiom of my work, but at the same time it is important to me that I work in the interstices, where I occupy the gap that separates one from the other; or where there might be overlapping boundaries. I work in that space of overlap or intersection. I have spent much of my life in transit from one community to another, and as a result I often feel marginal to them all. I also feel something in common with people who are very different from one another. I try to make my marginality productive.

I was pleased and a bit surprised to show up on a couple end-of-year booklists: Entropy’s Best of 2018 Nonfiction Books and NPR’s Code Switch 2018 Book Guide. Despite the thrill of inclusion, I feel conflicted about such lists. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I feel good about them when I am on them. Bad about them when I am not.

Here’s at attempt at documenting my own reading year. It was a useful exercise to try to gather all I had read, and even to think about the kind of reading I do and why.

As Radical, As Mother, As Salad, As Shelter: What Should Art Institutions Do Now? Paper Monument (ed)

Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen

Social Medium: Artists Writing, 2000-2015, Jennifer Liese (ed)

Schizophrene, Bhanu Kapil

If They Come for Us, Fatimah Asghar

Books I re-read for a particular purpose this year:

Plainwater, Anne Carson

Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Recocylopedia, Harryette Mullen

Jane, A Murder, Maggie Nelson

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine

Citizen, Claudia Rankine

Ban en Banlieue, Bhanu Kapil

Books I’m reading now, as part of current work:

Gap Gardening, Rosmarie Waldrop

The Dream of the Unified Field, Jorie Graham

Books I’m reading now, as part of teaching:

The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen

Tiger Writing, Gish Jen

How to Write about Contemporary Art, Gilda Williams

The documentation begs the persistent question: How do I keep track of the way a book moves me? How it lives in me? The list making is one way, but feels insufficient, superficial. I suppose something more like an annotated bibliography is another way, which I may try in the new year. There are only so many notebooks one can keep.

In fits and starts, I maintain a file box of quotes. Inspired both by the lists of quotes and “gems” that I kept in grad school, at the urging of Jen Bervin, and by Austin Kleon’s blog post about keeping (and revisiting) notebooks. Updated sporadically, I maintain a list of categories, an index that grows more unwieldy with each session.

{Here is where I considered including a photo of my index, but the categories made me too self-conscious. Another time, perhaps.}

The booklists above do not reflect the books I bought in the past year with the intention of reading. Or the books accumulating in little piles on my office floor. A preview of a few I’m particularly excited about:

I’m a bit travel-addled, not sleeping well. Last night, I finally drifted into wispy sleep, but then woke myself from a dream that my son had missed his bus and was running out into a busy street to catch up to it. He was waving his arms and yelling please. His sobbing jolted me awake, heart racing.

I drifted off again. Then woke with the image of an apple, sliced but then re-assembled, held together with a rubber band around its middle. Benign, perhaps, but in the dream state, there is something sullied and deceitful to it.

—

I am thinking about daily practice. For the month, I’ve put aside one project and returned to another. There are many reasons it makes sense to change focus for a time, but there’s also a cost to the switching. Upon my return to it, the question looms: Is it even in the right form? I know well enough that the only way to know is to wade around in the muck of it for a while, so for now, I’m resigned to my discomfort. For various uninteresting reasons, I’ve resisted thinking deeply and seriously about genre distinctions, but at some point, decisions must be made.

—

I’ve finally read the short chapter in which Freud discusses “repetition compulsion.” I’d read of it, but not the text itself. He writes:

“There is one special class of experiences of the utmost importance for which no memory can as a rule be recovered. These are experiences which occurred in very early childhood and were not understood at the time but which were subsequently understood and interpreted.”

Instead of remembering, we enact. Rather than articulate the fears, doubts, and helplessness of those experiences (because we are unable), we enact them: “He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating.”

—

For Freud, of course, one way to acquire knowledge is through dreams. A tricky proposition, to be sure. Perhaps I am my son, crying out for some lost thing. Perhaps I am being deceived. Or am I the bus driver, moving on, indifferent? Or the apple, forever broken, but appearing, for the moment, whole?

There is a recognition in all these women’s lives and work that there is no personal without political, that the Korean American woman exists in a politicized body, politicized state. To proceed as if otherwise is a kind of self-denial, self-abnegation. I was trying to resist this impulse toward self-erasure, too.

I never know where to begin. So, I try to do what I tell my students. Be explicit about your position.

At a symposium yesterday about writing and art, and art criticism, and artists who write about art and other artists, a whole body of work I know little about, despite its intersections with my own interests, I felt at once both moved to immediate action, taking down titles and names to look up later, and wearied, how will I ever catch up?

(The poet who asked us, what poem did you read today, and when we all looked around a little hesitant, a little confused, he said, “Well, good luck with your hobby.” The unveiled sneer in it.)

I understand it, this desire to recognize seriousness, in self, in others. It is not that I don’t understand it. I wonder what proof is necessary. Perhaps I am asking the wrong questions.

Perhaps I am feeling a bit antsy about my own practices these days. Since the semester started, I’ve been scattered, pressed. Several short trips that have interrupted daily routines of course, but there are other concerns lurking beneath. Doubts, uncertainty. And more often than not, the impossible question, what is the point.

(Who said it: The work is the work is the work.)

I’ve started a new project somewhat unintentionally, but now, two months in, starting to take the faintest shape. A series of morning poems. What is starting to emerge? A notion of fine-ness. As in craft? Re-fining? Fine, as in end? As in the smallest pieces of something? Fines. In this house overlooking where the textile mill once stood. Of finery.

Remember when I convinced myself that the man I was in love with would meet and promptly fall love with my best friend? I heard something — that he was in New York for the summer, or that she was. The idea that they might cross paths. And then, the conviction that they would. How I spent long summer weeks tearful, alternating between longing and rage. That the two people I loved most in the world would choose each other over me. That I would be shut out.

It starts in the body. The stomach flips. Or is it the heart.

Sometimes an inkling. A hunch. Sometimes you know someone so well, or think you do, that you believe you can predict their actions. Sometimes, you see a thing and are convinced you can trace it back to its source. Sometimes, you are right, and you think I am so good at being right. Sometimes, you want very much to be wrong.

—

A dream of high school, again. Is it because I always think of her around her birthday? Late summer, suffused with melancholy. The shapeless days coming to an end, but not quite yet --

There are things I still want to do in these final weeks. The grave and the trivial. Where has the summer gone?

Let this be the record of these days passing. Let this be the document of hours spent in doubt, in curiosity, in wonder. A little joy.

On the ends of things, she said: “There is grief, and there is gratitude. And grief. And then, there is embracing your new life.”

In 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man and woman who would become her American parents and where she would become the artist and writer Mary-Kim Arnold. Her new book, Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018), is her attempt to grapple with that history and its aftermath, to understand the experience of that girl she once was and how that girl shaped the woman she would become. Arnold writes:

“I will never know for certain what transpired in those first two years of my life. I only know that I am continually drawn back, tethered to the whispy, blurred possibilities of the mother I will never know, a language I do not speak, the life I will never have.”

Through a dazzling range of literary strategies, from the use of archival documents and family photographs to primers on the Korean language and the work of her fellow Korean-American artists, Arnold explores these wispy, blurred possibilities. She takes us into her need to know this never-realized self and this life she never lived. By stunning and poignant turns, her book reveals the complexities of the lives we do end up living, the hauntings that make us who we are, and the unexpected way in which great art and artists pull us apart and pieces us back together.

"Where every student [of fiction] eventually arrives is a place where the formal problems of the work are the same as the psychological problems of the student and the philosophical problems of the student's worldview. And that's a good place for students to arrive; it also shows that the formal problems of the work are now deeper." –Jane Smiley

Spent a lovely Sunday afternoon at 9 1/2 Main Gallery in Nyack, New York to read with Suzanne Parker for River River.

Anu and Donna are founders of River River, a literary journal, writing community, and more. It's been such a pleasure to reconnect with Donna, an old college friend. We lost touch after our children were born, but then found each other again when she and I were both published in the same journal.

Came across an unexpected reference to my past in a book I am reading for work. A name leaps from the white page and transports —

How unnerving that time can shift like that.

—

Writing is slow, slow, but an occasional line or phrase that even if useless in itself as a line, provides a point of departure:

One comes to love, inexplicably, the places they first found love.

Carried all morning like a koan.

The morning’s labors: meditation on train stations as sites of desire.

—

Emerging from a few immobilizing doubt-filled days. Circling the fallow ground.

On the one hand: I am too attentive to the moment-by-moment shifts in my own mind. On the other: my own mind is locked cabinet.

From my notes, from the news: A litter of kittens taped into a cardbox box and buried.

From the news: The body of a Georgia man who was found dead, rolled up in a gymnasium mat, exhumed for the second time.

—

The morning’s (other) labors:

I am here to be with my father. The father I barely know. I get up early. Run through the village and down by the quarry. He sleeps. His wife boils water in an ancient kettle, stirs coffee powder into it. I don’t know how long I will stay.

We fight about the weather. “I wouldn’t call that a light rain,” he says.

At night, he takes me down to the tavern where his friends gather around a table in the back. They drink, play cards, tell stories about the war. Sometimes I stay. Sometimes, I take a stool at the bar instead. There’s always a pile of old newspapers and magazines and I scan through them idly while Kit, behind the bar, pours the gin.

In the news: a box of kittens taped into a cardbox box and buried. A kid walking through the woods heard mewling. I’m languishing here, but I am not yet ready to leave.